Re: After a year has perception of FCPX changed?

Re: After a year has perception of FCPX changed?by Mark Dobson on May 28, 2012 at 8:07:08 am

[Bill Davis]"I think they released a killer 'personal editing tool" based around wildly new thinking that took most of us half a year or more of constant use to really begin to come to grips with - and are now growing it very rapidly into an amazing modern content creation app that can handle most tasks tossed at it right now by people outside of "large facility" workflows."

I'm with you on this Bill.

Despite some really irksome missing functions like not being able to selectively copy attributes, or do a one click audio dissolve etc etc FCPX has become the replacement editing solution from FCP7 for me.

A big point you make in the quote above is the fact that it does take a long period to reorient oneself to working with FCPX. It is not the same as other non-linear edit packages and I think a lot of people will have immediately run into problems by trying to edit in the same manner as they had in FCP7, and failing or getting into a muddle immediately.

I adopted FCPX from the start ( very nearly 12months ago! ) and apart from DVD Studio Pro haven't used
Final Cut Studio at all in the last year.

I went through a disorienting 3 month period where either through the buggy early versions of the software or my own ineptitude I ran into huge difficulties with content crashes and force quits - it felt like the central kernel at the heart of the software just couldn't cope with more than one thing at a time.

But nowadays crashes are a rare occurrence and since version 10.0.4 every thing that should happen, does happen.

I actually think that FCPX offers a really flexible approach to editing. And I have every confidence that the next update will address even more of the 'missing features' that people gripe about.

But in terms of addressing the topic of this thread 'After a year has perception of FCPX changed?' I would say yes and no.

I think a lot of people made up their minds almost immediately that FCPX use didn't look right for them and some of those will have tried it again following the updates and introduction of Broadcast Monitoring and the ability to export XML, to communicate with other systems.

I don't know whether we will ever discover the real reason why Apple chose to EOL Final Cut Studio, licensing issues? A clean slate?, but the fact that it was knocked on the head had a huge impact on the perceptions towards FCPX at its launch.

I think there was a real disappointment that such a robust system had been discarded in favour for a, on initial investigation, substantially cut-back version.

And Apple must have been profoundly shocked by the initial, very fierce, negative response to the launch and they now seem to be a lot more open about future developments for this software to the extent of publishing a roadmap, a hint that there will be a return to having a dedicated source monitor and enhanced audio capability.

So I think that FCPX will slowly regain any ground it has lost as a result of the miss handled launch.

But choice of NLE seems to similar to choice of religion and we know firmly entrenched peoples views are towards that, nothing will change those types of perceptions.